This invention relates to the marking of products to establish their identity, source, and fate.
Major problems experienced in many areas of the world and in connection with many different products is that of product counterfeiting, unauthorized distribution and sale of a product (e.g. grey market trading, parallel trading, product diversion), as well as false liability based on product substitution.
Throughout the world, manufacturers provide the products they sell with a visually distinctive appearance, packaging or labels so that customers can distinguish their products from those of others. As a result, their customers learn to associate the visually distinctive appearance with certain standards of quality, and, if they are satisfied with those standards, will buy products provided with that visually distinctive appearance in preference to others. Once customers have acquired a preference for products provided with a particular visually distinctive appearance, the manufacturers become vulnerable to product counterfeiting.
A counterfeit product consists of a product that is provided with a visually distinctive appearance, or a brand name, confusingly similar to that of a genuine product. Customers seeing the visually distinctive appearance or the familiar brand name provided to the counterfeit product, buy this product in the expectation that they are buying a genuine product.
There are many ways known of providing products with a visually distinctive appearance. In general, the visually distinctive appearance is provided either directly to the product or to an article with which the material is associated, for example a label, wrapper or container. The visually distinctive appearance may be, for example, a distinctive shape or configuration, a distinctive marking, or a combination of the two. A particularly preferred visually distinctive appearance is a trademark.
The material of a counterfeit product may be the same as, or different from the material of a genuine product. Often the material of the counterfeit product is the same, but of inferior quality. For instance, it is usually difficult to distinguish a chemical product having a particular chemical formula and made by one manufacturer, from the same chemical, with the same formula, but made by a different manufacturer. This is particularly so if the two manufacturers use the same production process. For this reason, it is not difficult for the unscrupulous to establish the chemical formula of an active ingredient in a composition, and the relative amounts of the various ingredients in the composition, and then pass off his own product as that of another manufacturer.
In addition to product counterfeiting, product adulteration is another major problem. Product adulteration takes place when a product is tampered with such as by dilution. An example of such a problem lies in the adulteration of lubricating oils, or other oil-based products, by addition of a counterfeiter's oil to a genuine product. Such adulteration is not only financially damaging to the oil manufacturer but the consequent lowering of performance which can occur can cause damage to the consumer and consequently harm the reputation of the genuine product. A method of overcoming this problem has been previously proposed involving the incorporation of a visible dye in the product. Such a strategy is easily copied.
The following patent documents are hereby incorporated by reference.
WO 87/06383 discloses a method of labelling an item or substrate by means of macromolecules, in particular, DNA or proteins. European patents 0327163 and 0409842, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,429,952 disclose methods of marking products with chemicals that can be measured by immunoassay or by other specific binding assays.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,304,493, 5,244,808 and 4,918,020 disclose methods of marking petroleum products with dyes and subsequent detection of the dyes using standard solid phase extraction technology.
WO 95/21673, WO 94/14835, WO 93/09075, WO 93/05068, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,310,648 and 5,110,833 all disclose methods for preparing imprinted polymers that subsequently maintain the ability to selectively bind the imprinting chemical.